Beacon technical talks at GA4GH Plenary 2016

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The most recent Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Plenary meeting ended a couple of days ago. This time, it took place in Vancouver, just before ASHG 2016 (Oct 16-18). As always, the meeting was organized very well (huge thanks to everybody involved), and successful in advancing GA4GH projects, as well as introducing new people to the initiatives. The Beacon project itself featured a full day of sessions (half a day of conference talks including progress updates from various subprojects, and half a day of unconference).

In this post, I’d like to summarize and share materials from the talks I gave, which fit into the technical, developer-oriented portion of the sessions in nature.

Beacon API

Beacon API was the subject of the first technical update session of the day. The talk was primarily for people new to the Beacon Project, or people not participating in our conference calls on a regular basis. Based on the survey from the beginning of the talk, this was the majority the room, which is great. Together with Jordi Rambla, we provided an overview of where we stand with the latest release of the Beacon API, how we got there, what we’re working on at the moment, and what our plans for the more distant future are.

Beacon Development

During the last few months, we’ve been working hard on making it easier for people to light beacons. The purpose of this talk was to provide an overview of open-source tools that came out of this effort. The categories of tools presented here include beacon development kits, implementations of beacons contributed by various organizations involved in the project, client libraries and interfaces, a prototype of a compliance suite, and other utilities potentially useful to developers (e.g. a coordinate conversion library).

Check out the slides from the talk (download here), which include descriptions and links to all the tools:

Beacon Network

Beacon Network is one of the most prominent applications developed on top of the Beacon protocol, aggregating data from all the public beacons. A talk on the Beacon Network was focused on summarizing the latest developments in the project, including usage statistics and other data, current and future features, as well as related tooling.